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Idle2Run

This accounts for 20% of your final mark.

Transitional animations arecritically important to creating smooth natural movement on your game characters. These type of animations do not loop, they just play once between one cycle and another. The goal is to create a quick and efficient bridge between two animations where straight interpolation won't suffice. In this assignment we'll be bridging the gap between your idle animation cycle and your run cycle.

Match poses

It's important that we have a perfect match between the animations so that when they play there are no hitches or pops. when it's done right, the character should smoothly move from idle to running. Use Pose2Shelf to create a shelf pose for the last/first frame of your idle cycle. We'll be using the run animation to build the Idle2Run, so we don't need to make a shelf pose for the run last/first frame. Remember if you later revise either of these animations, you'll have to fix your match pose for them.

Ground Speed

The next thing we need to establish is ground speed during your run. During your idle, ground speed is 0 units per frame. The Idle2Run animation needs to ramp up to your run speed smoothly (ease in/out). Once we have the match pose for idle. Open up your run animation and save it as Idle2Run. Grab the "All_Anim" and following the method shown in class - apply forward translation keys so that the feet of the character appear to lock. Shift the entire run animation down the timeline so that you have some time to get your character up to speed. 18-30 frames or so.

Build the Transition

Place your idle match pose at the start of the animation and then animate the transition between standing and running using good mechanics of balance, thrust and weight shift.